“That’ll do. Now, here’s how we’re gonna play it. Skinner’s gonna tell me his long story. Then I’ll decide what I want to do with the two of you, and I’ll come round you up. Whatcha think, Skin? Fifteen minutes? Is it that long a story?” He threw his head back and laughed. “Jesus, Skin, if Scheherazade had looked like you, her old man would have offed her the first night.”

Then he sat up and turned to Frances and me. He didn’t look like a man who’d just laughed. “Ever seen a rabbit after a dog’s caught it? Run, you little rabbits. I’ll be right behind you.”

7.1: You get what you pay for

Had we known that Tom, in this one thing, was perfectly trustworthy, we’d have taken the elevator.

Instead we ran as we’d been ordered to. We plunged down the fire stairs in the near darkness of the emergency lighting and the sealed-in heat of the past day. At first we tried to pause at landings, watching for an ambush, waiting for the sound of a shot. We gave it up after a dozen floors. After all, what did it get us? A chance to return fire? With what? But the strain on our nerves was as great as the strain on our legs and lungs.

By the time we reached the foot of the stairs we were both wringing wet. Frances had twice come close to falling. She leaned on the door at the bottom of the stairwell, her head flung back, the breath shuddering in and out of her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I ought to say so, while I had the chance.”

“It doesn’t matter.” And it really didn’t. She’d killed — my friend? I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell, I wasn’t sure what a friend was. I could have asked him whether we were friends, if she hadn’t — But she wasn’t responsible; cats kill birds, and rattlesnakes bite, that’s what they do. She only wanted one thing in the world. I wondered if she wanted anything else now.

“What’s out there?” she asked. “Should I be prepared for the unusual?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s the Hall of Broken Glass.”

A thin burst of a laugh. “Crystal Court. What happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” I said again. “The whole first floor is empty, except for the guard desk. I think the mess has been left as a no-man’s-land. We’ll be exposed, crossing it.”

“Well, that’ll be a change. Let’s do it.”

We came out of the stairwell quickly. I led, because I knew where the door was. Frances knew where the doors used to be. Weak pools of light overlapped across broken tile floor and drifts of glass and plastic shards, and shone through gaping frames that had once been storefronts, rimed with the remains of shattered plate glass. In the center of the room the twisted wreck of an escalator lay, wrenched free of the sagging second-level balcony and heaped on the floor like the spine of a metal dinosaur. I had a badly preserved bit of videotape of an old television show that showed this space full of people, the escalator turning and turning. I’d watched it once, and never again.